


On your own time

by orphan_account



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Abuse, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 11:53:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 965
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6237583
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A very short work about the past. Not shipping. Hopefully cathartic, but it is about abuse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On your own time

It was 1983. And Bill wanted in.

He interrupted at a pace no more or less than every few seconds, short-circuiting Ford’s thoughts and, more than once, interrupting him midsentence and making him glance apologetically at Fiddleford, who was used enough to this by now to know not to say anything. If he could just finish out the  thought, he believed he was onto something – what, he couldn’t ever remember in the decades later, but the moment. The moment stuck out in his mind; no particular reason why. Just like a dream.

The interruptions grew to double-pace, effectively preventing Ford from thinking at all, and his favorite chastising notion on which to meditate was his brother (memory marked at seventeen or so, but airbrushed over with the present age, courtesy of  twinhood identical in fact, if not in biology), cut-and-pasted from a crystal memory of a fight he’d had in high school, fist cutting into Bill. The harsh laugh tumbled into his brain like a crack on an egg; “HA! THAT IDIOT?”

“He’s not an idiot,” Ford said, not defensively, because Bill rose to things like that, but chidingly, as if he didn’t care. Stan wouldn’t hear it, anyway, and it couldn’t hurt him that way. Bill’s laugh had a way of drowning out anything else.

It had been rough, the first few times, and Ford had woken up sore, smarting. It only made sense – “YOU HAVE TO FORGIVE A GUY!” Bill had said, and Ford had had to. Simple science. Of course Bill had the faculty to both work with him and maintain his body, where Ford had enough for only one of two tasks. Of course Bill would get curious here and there, stray into things he shouldn’t. Of course he wasn’t used to the consequences. After all, he so rarely got to do this. You had to forgive a guy. And Ford had to. Bill noticed when he didn’t.

Fiddleford flinched when Ford found a shard of the mug he’d been missing for weeks lying under a desk. They locked eyes. Neither of them said anything. Fiddleford knew the risks when he signed up for this, Ford had explained them.

If Ford felt guilty, well, that was his own fault.

It was easier, at some point, to just assume Bill was listening all the time. Better practice, anyway, to consider the reality of these things. It never quite sat right with Ford. The pyramids, the evolution of human science. Everything he’d admired, everything mankind was capable of, attributable to forces beyond its understanding. But that was the way it was, and it was childish to hold onto hope when progress – _progress –_  was hanging around his shoulders, a reflective mist that never quite went away. If mankind had had help, then it’d had help, and that was the way it was. And there was no shame in him having help, either.

In the years after their – purely professional, if violent, he shakingly assured himself time and again, and one had to be careful, to be CAREFUL, because Bill got ANGRY and didn’t calm down until later, but Ford was unharmed, at least – parting, he found he could only think in quick bursts. Off too long, and his brain imitated the  sensation of sharp electrical raps, demanding entry. No, he muttered, NO, and refined his mental image of a brawling Stanley, the man no longer relevant, no longer available to be injured, wherever he was these days. He redoubled his journaling, experimented further with the invisible ink, which was safer, SAFER. Easier to keep track of things that way. Bill didn’t know what he was doing. (“I KNOW EVERYTHING!” and he couldn’t scrub the subsequent laugh and the taste of bloody tongue from the walls of his brain, but nothing was the same afterwards, nothing could be relied upon, and it was his own fault for not being stronger, SMARTER. The way he was supposed to be. He didn’t know where he had changed. Maybe that’s why it hadn’t worked.)

And a forward flash, a good thirty years, the height of the familiar drama that doesn’t walk like old alien tongues across the surface of a grey matter, but more current. Less strange, somehow, in the way that minds made little sense. Ford woke up in chains, fractured out of the time he’d left off in, but just by a few days, so that’s nothing he hadn’t been used to. It didn’t occur to him to be afraid, why should he be?  He was safe, he was SAFE – but his heart raced anyway, and he clenched his fist against too much adrenalin. Bill renewed purchase on the laugh that painted Ford’s waking existence red and gold, and then renewed the gold as a funny little joke. He meant nothing by it. Ford returned to the eternal incognizant moment of wanting to scream, sob, through the petrification of his throat. He had no conscious mind to explain away this impulse.

But finally, he stood behind the trailing vapor of a failed invention fired, at the end of his brother’s plan, which had been the only thing in his life, in the end, that had ever. EVER worked. There flashed to mind the guarding image of a brawling Stanley, fist cutting into Bill. Tears pooled against his glasses and rivulets trickled over his strained, miserable smile, lips pressed together tight, because he had someone now, someone to be strong for, and he didn't trust himself not to scream to the effect of all those years if he opened his mouth. And with two children and the world at his back, Stanford realized too little and too late what Stanley must have known the minute he’d seen him again, all those years ago.

He had been wronged.

**Author's Note:**

> you know when you write something down just to make it stop threatening the life it belongs to


End file.
